So, I'm considering purchasing a nice new drive for my PC so that the boot time, access time, and overall speediness of the drive is increased exponentially (as in the near future I will be using my computer for heavy 3D modelling and related game development work), and am torn on what to consider replacing my 160GB Seagate drive with. (It's not even a fast drive I have at the moment--it's the seagate equivalent to a WD Green drive).

Feel free to make suggestions other than the following, but keep in mind:

-- For my boot drive, I have an emphasis of speed over space; but my bare minimum is 120GB.
-- I'd like to not spend over $250, unless that 15k rpm SAS drive is really fast.
-- Noise is of no issue. I actually like a little background white noise, it helps me sleep.
-- Drive will be used for OS and apps installations; media, files, projects, and other things will be stored on a separate WD Green drive.
-- Current PC specs are in sig.

As long as you have lots of space elsewhere go SSD. I have two Corsairs in raid 0 (just OS and apps no data) and its crazy fast. 496MB read and I forget the writes but a bit slower. IO's are through the roof as well... I have always ran raided drives on my desktop to get that little bit extra but its the access times and small file read write performance that just make the difference with SSD. my last setup was 4 raided SATA drives that toped out at 400MB same read test, but this is just a whole other ball of wax.

Definitely an SSD. VRaptors are not worth the money anymore and SAS drives and never worth it for a home desktop machine. The difference in performance between your current 160GB and the Vertex 2 should be just outstanding.

And yes, some of the Indillix drives of the past are starting to die out, but that was when things were in their infancy. Perhaps people were rough on them too. Who knows the full story...

I've had a Vertex 60GB in my laptop for just over a year now without issues. And a Vertex 2 120GB in my desktop for 6 months. Both are running great and I keep them up-to-date with firmware.

But as others have said, if you're doing modelling and stuff, I think you should really consider a 4 or 6-core CPU and possibly 8GB+ of RAM too. Possibly a Quadro/FireGL video card too if you really get into things.

I would definitely say go for an SSD as you'll see the performance increase using that over a 10k RPM hard drive and wasting your money on a SAS hard drive. Just make sure to run it with a surrogate hard drive to prolong its lifespan.